So, search vbulletin converters or vbulletin converter* and you get it. It should be smart enough to give it to you the first time, and since most users are looking for a single converter, in this example, IPS is losing business. Especially since the IPS Migration page under "Get it now" still has the 3.4 converter so you have to search for the new one. Also you call it "Migration Tool" on the company page, and when you click to get it it's called "Converters" which makes it hard to find as well in search for those looking for the migration tool. Finding the actual v4 converters was a task but I finally found them.

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I agree, search is really hard to use. I know the request is "provide a specific example". I can just tell you it doesn't feel like it finds anything I want when I am looking for things. I don't like exact searches. Especially because I don't know "EXACTLY" what I am searching for, thus why I am using a search. I would much prefer fuzzy find. Google search is fantastic, it's almost better to bring in a site google search at this point.

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A competent search system is very important to me. When you have millions of posts in your forum spanning over a decade, it's really important that people be able to use the search system to quickly find the content they are interested in. I consider it one of the most important aspects of the forum, really. If guests cannot find what they are looking for, they may leave and go search elsewhere. If existing users cannot find what they are searching for, they may start a new topi duplicating existing topics. The stronger the search system and it's ability to find relevant posts, the better the community, in my opinion.

It's been frustrating for me to use the search here. I very often have to resort to Google to perform a search of these forums. It also frustrates me that search functionality seems to be a second-class citizen at Invision. I am currently running Sphinx, and I'm concerned that using MySQL's built-in search is going to result in poorer results, and perhaps be considerably more resource intensive on my server versus Sphinx. This talk of a possible cloud-based solution isn't really the direction I was hoping for.

Please Invision, give me confidence that my transition from 3.4.x to 4.x will not result in a step backwards as far as searching goes.

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I'd like to be able to search 4.2 or 4.1.12 and find topics on what is up and coming in that version but it yields 0 results. Probably a mysql limitation (the .) but severely limiting for any software or technology search. I too use google site search but that does not work in private forums.

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I remember in another discussion about search that someone made the astute observation that it's not that IPS search is bad, it's that Google's search is so, so good ... and we as regular consumers take the Google search for granted with their thousands of PhD data scientists constantly fine-tuning the algorithms and research behind search.

IPS' strength is not in developing search. But everyday users and admins expect the level of Google search.

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I remember in another discussion about search that someone made the astute observation that it's not that IPS search is bad, it's that Google's search is so, so good ... and we as regular consumers take the Google search for granted with their thousands of PhD data scientists constantly fine-tuning the algorithms and research behind search.

IPS' strength is not in developing search. But everyday users and admins expect the level of Google search.

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@Joel R that's why there exists software like Sphinx or Elasticsearch. Invision doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, they just need to take advantages of the software that do that. They already use 3º party software in Invision Suit instead of reinventing all.

Google only have access to the HTML of our site, but we have access to our own Database, so we have the responsibility of having a better search than Google.

There is more advantages in Sphinx than only the better search. For example, my site have 1.6 Million posts(its small compared to others), and my Search Index have 1Gb. That means it will use 1Gb of Ram in the Innodb Buffer. With Sphinx it used less than 100Mb of Ram, with the advantage of being faster. But the big feature of Sphinx is that it supports Stemming and Lemmatization Search, although Invision never supported it in 3.x and 4.0.

I don't like to talk about Invision competitors, because i think Invision is superior(that's why i am faithful to them), but in terms of Search, Xenforo is superior. They support Elasticsearch and they support Stemming Search.

Also, we don't need Cloud Search for this, when there are free software that can do the same. We don't need to pay more money for that... But i understand that Invision also wants to add supports for Cloud Search for big and busy sites. For the majority of their clients, i believe Sphinx or Elasticsearch is more than enough.

I'm more comfortable with Sphinx, but whatever works best would be preferred as long as my community doesn't need to rely on any external third-party services or resources for the Sphinx-alternative to work.

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I was breezing past this and had to comment, Search for sharing in the admin CP, nothing comes up. You have to type sha, shar, or share to bring up the "sharing" settings. I encounter this weird issue often with words.

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I really don't care how all the search stuff works, all I know is, I have better luck going to google to find what I need on these forums better than I do actually using the search function ON the forums itself.

How all that stuff works behind the scenes is beyond me sometimes. All I know is as everyone has stated numerous times. They can try to do a small search for something and usually I'm returned something TOTALLY different than what I'm actually looking for, or I'm returned with a 1000 mods from adriano lol.